God and Country
by PHIL JONES
There is a $1,100 billion hole in the federal budget. Our so-called leaders are squabbling over how to reduce that hole by a mere $61 billion. They seem to have agreed that the best way to do this is to let poor people freeze to death. What a bunch of geniuses.
Democrats figured out long ago that big spending is good politics. Government spending creates jobs, and the congressman or woman who “brings home the bacon” to his or her constituents tends to get re-elected.
Starting in 1980, Republicans figured out that tax cuts are good politics. Letting people keep more of their own money appeals to the basic greed of the American people, and the distrust of government which the Republicans have been selling for the last 30 years has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. After 1985, the GOP decided that deficits didn’t matter and tax cuts were the solution of first, second and third resort. That catechism has been taught to all incoming Republican congressmen ever since.
Both parties have been reckless and irresponsible. Like selfish children, neither party has bothered paying for their pet priorities. The result is a national debt so large that there is a clear and present danger the global bond markets will downgrade our debt to junk status. That would mean disaster, in the form of high interest rates that strangle economic growth.
When Ronald Reagan took office 30 years ago, the national debt stood at about $1 trillion. Now it stands at about $14 trillion, and rapidly growing. The economy has not grown 14-fold in those 30 years. Public and private indebtedness in the U.S. stands at $50 trillion, giving us our highest leverage ratio in the country’s history.
We must cut spending and raise taxes. It is foolish to extend the tax cuts to the richest two percent of Americans in light of our current circumstances. The rich have already had a free ride for much too long. Wealth and income shifted to the very top strata of our society in a way that we’ve never seen in history. What prosperity we have seen in the past 30 years has been debt-fueled and bubble-based.
To get the economy back to health, we’re going to have to reset the basic parameters of our economy. This is about cleaning up the mess the morning after, from a 30-year binge that was unsustainable. In part this means placing a much higher tax burden on upper incomes.
But all this is just the rantings of some naive socialist liberal, right? Wrong. Virtually every word of the foregoing was uttered by David Stockman.
Who is David Stockman? He was Ronald Reagan’s Budget Director. That’s right. Ronald Reagan’s Budget Director. He is known as the Architect of Reaganomics. Even he is now saying that “Supply Side” economics will not work in our current situation – if it ever did. It’s time to take the rich off welfare.
Wake up, America. The hour is getting very, very late.
